Abstract

Product reviews from consumers are the source of opinions and expressions about purchased items or services. Thus, it is essential to understand the true meaning behind text reviews. One of the ways is to analyze sentiments, expressions and emotions behind the text. However, there are different styles of writing used in the text. One of widely used in the text is letter capitalization. It is commonly used to strengthen an expression or louder tone within the text. This paper explores the value of expression behind letter capitalization in product reviews. We compared fully capitalized text, text with one capitalized words and text without capitalization
through the readers’ perspective by asking them to rate the text based on Likert scale. Furthermore, we tested two samples of text with and without capitalization on 27 available online sentiment tools. Testing was done in order to check how current sentiment tools treat letter capitalization in their sentiment score. Results show that of letter capitalization is able to enforce the different level of expression. If the nature of the review is positive, the capitalization makes it more positive. Similar for the negative reviews, the capitalization tends to increase negativity.